on the question of 'right to maintainership'

Dear all,

I am herewith soliciting opinions and 'current practise' on the question
of maintainership of inetnums. We are in the position of having several
allocations that are infested with 'historical' PI assignments, i.e.
address assignments that have been assigned before the advent of CIDR.

My LIR (de.xlink) currently refuses to enter maintainers different from 
ours to inetnums from our allocation, due to less than happy experiences 
with different (even also LIR) maintainers in the past (when the user of 
the 'historical' PI left its new provider and renumbered they lost all 
interest in the inetnum and it took quite some time to get the object 
referring to the then long returned address space deleted).

Some people seem to think that they have a right to maintainership to
objects that are assigned to them; I cannot find any such rule in the LIR
procedures, and also it would be a good question where that would stop ..
has anybody assigned a PA /29 a right to maintain their own object? and if
yes, how are the hostmasters responsible for an allocation supposed to
keep their charge in order? After assignment, anything but the size of the
range would be fair game, very fun especially in cases where a tech-c
decides that the inetnum range is their personal property even though it
has not been assigned to them personally (and that is by no means a rare
occurrence).

Of course both the crook and the misled are the exception, not the rule,
but we -do- have maintainers in the first place because of them, and a
rule ought to be based on something better than 'you look kind of
trustworthy'.

What's your position on the problem as such? 

And if you give third parties maintainership of inetnums in your
allocation(s), under what rules do you do so? To any kind of inetnum?
To anyone asking who has a maintainer object? 

And if you do so, do you still assign from that allocation(s)?

kind regards,
	Petra Zeidler
-- 
[A] KPNQwest Germany * Emmy-Noether-Strasse 9 * D-76131 Karlsruhe
[T] +49 721 9652 215   [F] +49 721 9652 171
[E] petra.zeidler at kpnqwest.com                [I] www.kpnqwest.de